Sales Performance

Sales performance is impacted by many factors. A few include sales enablement efforts, such as sales training and content management; the customer experience and the quality of the product. A combination of these elements impacts overall sales performance. It’s critical that salespeople have the training, context, and guidance they need to successfully engage customers.

10 Tips to Boost Sales Performance

Use the right sales model
Keep your sales strategy evolving with the market
Hire the right people
Invest in sales enablement
Use data to inform decisions
Make personalization of content easy
Elevate the customer experience with your brand
Incent all team members to stay hungry
Take care of your people
Use happy customer to build the network

Changing Market Demands on Sales Performance

Today’s successful salesperson must meet the needs of buyers who expect sophisticated, consultative, and technology-enabled salespeople. The stereotypical B2B salesperson, who fights over leads, only works the phone, and takes clients to golf, is obsolete. Instead, a successful consultative seller needs to negotiate data deals, leverage relationship analytics, and attend industry events. The quintessential 21st century B2B consultant seller will:

Take an omnichannel approach

Today’s business consumers want to interact with sellers in meaningful and personalized ways, and they want a contextually relevant and positive experience across all of their preferred channels. It’s important for the sales teams to work with marketing to create tailored content that’s relevant for each stage of the funnel so that salespeople engage with purpose and meaningful insight.

Be empathetic and trustworthy

While machines can never foster trust or empathy, they can alleviate B2B sellers’ time constraints. With more time in their day, sellers can develop a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ roles and business challenges, build trust, and project more empathy. In the financial services world, for example, trust is paramount. The ideal consultative seller is someone who can build trust by using the buyers’ preferred channels and by sharing content that speaks to them.

Be quick and nimble decision makers.

The consultant seller must consume and process data to learn about buyers’ affiliations, challenges, and objectives and make informed decisions. The sales consultants of the future will “have a dashboard that will notify them of different buyer activities across the life cycle and will serve up recommendations for prioritization and triage.” These sellers will process and evaluate that information and then quickly decide how to execute.

Engage in strategic collaboration.

Internally B2B sellers will partner with data scientists to identify patterns that help uncover additional revenue streams and will partner with marketers to increase the level of personalization of their messaging. Externally with prospects and customers, they will collaborate around initiatives and objectives, using shared metrics of success, and will co-create proposals, business cases, and account reviews.

How can you improve your team’s sales performance

Increase active selling time

Establish a single source of truth for all sales collateral. This reduces the time sellers spend looking for content, or even worse, creating their own content because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
Link your CRM with Showpad to automatically log all sales activity for you. You’ll have full visibility on what your sellers have been doing, the content they’ve shared so far, and how engaged buyers are.
Showpad provides recommendations for content to share on an opportunity-level and provides insights into content that buyers are actively engaging with.

Boost seller readiness

Showpad allows your marketing and enablement teams to add context to the content they’re providing, like when and how to use a specific asset.
Use engagement metrics to identify forecasted deals at risk of not closing. For deals in a crucial stage, investigate how many interactions your sellers are having and the buyer’s interest levels during those interactions.
Before launching a new asset, product or messaging, marketing and enablement can assign interactive courses to your team ensuring that everyone has the necessary training and practice before going in front of a buyer.

Cultivate a culture of coaching

Providing feedback is important, but it needs to remain manageable. Track your team’s progress and results in a dedicated manager hub, Identify areas of improvement to give targeted feedback on customer meetings, practice pitches or product courses in a matter of minutes.
Deal reviews have never been easier. Instead of dialing into every conversation, listen to your team’s conversations when you have the time. Scan through call keywords to uncover where your sellers need feedback.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.

What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to enterprise buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.

Sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, a sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

What is the importance of sales enablement?

Motivating your sales team is not the only critical component of a successful business organization. Sales enablement plays a critical role in developing your enterprise sales organization beyond a few top achievers. Enterprise sales enablement provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools, and resources required to be successful. An overwhelming majority of organizations experience significant growth in their sales as a result of enterprise sales enablement. What’s more, organizations with sales enablement achieve a far better win rate on their forecasted deals, compared to businesses without it. The importance of sales enablement comes down to the fact that salespeople are more likely to succeed in closing deals if they have the necessary tools, knowledge, practice, and resources.

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